Sorry for multiple posts in my own thread, it gets impossible without a text editor to do in one, plus this just works better, thanks.
This is kinda depressing and may be hard to read for some, it deals with suicide and heroin addiction, and also has some profanity. I hope it is allowed though, its slight and serves to make a point
This entire post is ©2013 C.G.EWING
the author retains all publishing rights, and although is cogniscant of the vagaries of the internet, wishes to make it public, here on the DMT NEXUS, for feedback from its members.
Thank you, if Im breaking a rule, let me know.
this is directly off my phone, typos and all, please excuse any errorrs of that type, they will be extinguished. This is not a publication edit.
## WE ARE THE UNDEFENDED
**prologue**
*** a sermon ***
"We've come to this place, this ruined and empty church tonight, to pray to gods we don't have, to live through another day in which we don't know how to, we come here to find our way, by groping through the darkness". I begin my sermon,a mass for the faithless, for the hopeless, for the loveless. We are legion, and we are alone.
There is no mass, really, we pray individually and alone to a to a deaf and dumb God who is in as much pain as we , or to a demon, or to a void, we wail and plead for relief at nothing at all; and cast words filled with doubt, and hope, but never faith, that is alien to us, into the empty spaces.
We look heavenward, into dark and empty skies, and we wait, and pray, and cry in desperation, for them to split asunder with a great lightning bolt, for the stars to fall down and deliver to us the freedom we long for. And we wait, and we wait.
We are told we are powerless, and have nothing in the way of strength, when strength is all we have. We ARE the strong, we are the soul survivors of a fatal consequence. We should be among those under the ground, but we are under the stars; we never planned for this, but we have lived through our death sentences. We were told that we are the un-recoverable.
We are the un-defended.
** 2**
***Davies note***
" I don't think it'll ever change, I'll always be this way, I'm sorry" his note said. His ex-girlfriend, my friend Kaylie, was the one he chose to force find his suicide. They had rented a motel room together, and they fought over his heroin use, she left, and got a room for herself right next door and cried herself to sleep. She found his corpse the next day, suicided, and now it is she,a 24 year old girl, who must pick up the pieces, and make sense out of something that by sheer virtue of it's nature, is senseless.
He said he loved her, that it *wasn't* her fault, but that he wouldn't have tied the rope into a noose around his neck, then to the shower head, and secured it further to the handicap rail, and he would not have shot the heroin that insured he'd "go out", and when he did, slump forward, forcing the tension of the rope into the stranglehold that would relentlessly prevent life in the form of oxygen and blood from re-entering his brain from his lungs and heart, killing him,had she not left him. This was his secret contract with her, her life for his, it was her breath on his lungs, and he would not breathe without her.
This was his reasoning to deny life; as if he had the right to create such a horrible solution to an impossible problem, his fear of a future that held not her, but rather nothing but pain and addiction, as if he were some great diviner, who could see far off into murky futures, divining that out of all possible futures, death was better. She had offered him an untenable ultimatum,.stop using heroin, not for a week, not for three months; which had done before he fell, but make effort, get help, not a temporary band-aid, but help. That can be very hard to find.
The heroin was just contingency. When she found him, he'd been there, using his own considerable body weight as counterbalance, slumped forward for 5 or 6 hours. He'd researched how to do it right, there's plenty of websites helping potential suicides do it effectively. Hanging is actually a fairly difficult way to die, it must be engineered- the knot must be tied correctly, to ensure it tightens, but won't loosen again, and the support must be capable of holding several hundred pounds for several hours. There's calculations involved, and apparently Davie was intelligent, and a maker. It's actually not very often that self-hanging succeeds, unless these considerations have been made. As with all forms of suicide, failure can result in a lifetime of disability-paralysis, brain damage and the like. Davie knew what he was doing, he took on his death like a home-improvement project, though he didn't let Kaylie on to his plan, he used her as invisible leverage, an unfair deal.
Davie absolutely had nothing on his mind further than suicide. That he had to drag her knowingly down that fucking road with him is wrong, just wrong. I never met the kid, it's easy for me to hate him in his death, but what he did to the poor girl he claimed to love enough to destroy himself over and who he forced to find him in the misery of death is inexcusable. He was in so much pain that he could not think beyond it, though.
***section cut***
Violence adds a grotesqueness to death, beyond its intrinsic terror. Lividity, or livor mortis, the discoloration a corpse experiences and the temporary rigidity known as rigor mortis are the two initial phases of decay, and their horror descends rapidly.
"I tried, ...I tried so hard,...so hard... to get it off,... I tried,... I tried to... cut him down, he was too ...heavy, the rope was so tight... I...didn't want to hurt him..but...but...he...-";she sobbed and heaved between her words, breaking them up into staggered, grief-stricken syllables.
She trailed off, then:."...cold, his tongue..." Her eyes glazed.
I wanted to put my hand over her mouth, but just nodded my head at her, signaling her to stop. She had that look on her face, staring into the distance, and I could tell she saw nothing there then but his face-bloated, grotesquely colored, almost clown-ish but for the deep instinctual terror it inspired in her, and I desperately fought for something to say to make the image fade, for a minute.
"can I have a cigarette?", was what I came up with; I'm trying to quit, it was going alright, but you know what they say, "I picked a fine day..."
She's tall, Kaylie is, taller than I, although that doesn't say all that much, but now she seemed small, as she folded herself physically in on herself, an outward indication of the collapse within. I can't even imagine,I have no way of emphasizing with her. I'm no stranger to death, in fact have made it's intimate acquaintance many times. I have no fear in saying that i know it well, but not like this. I can empathize with dead Davie, but not her. A girl, who'd seen something noone ever should, her lover hanging, dead at his own hand, and laying not blame on her, just the weight of the world, and all of it's death, right down on her little shoulders. Watching her shudder and heave under the massive pressure. I felt helpless, I can only clumsily run my hand across her shoulders in a lame attempt at comforting her.
He didn't love Kaylie, a suicide cannot love anyone, they die long before they stop breathing, before they even make the decision to. He found it so much easier to shoot heroin than feel. It was easier than telling Kaylie what he did it for, simpler than trying to attach words to his feelings, something actually physiologically difficult for men to do, let alone a man in the midst of an active opiate addiction.
He found it easier to go behind her back, spend the money they had saved for a home on dope, easier to hide and get high, to plan and carry out a suicide, than tell her what he wanted and needed from her, nor could he give her the devotion that she, that all partners, need, nor she to him.
He did not love her, although he truly thought he did, enough to die.
# 3
# #waking, underwater
I don't drink, much, I thought that would be the clincher, my contingency. I had timed it all just right: at 0:00 hours; ten 50mg phenergan, which is a nausea medication that heavily potentiates opiates as well as benzodiazapines, which were the next two things on my death prescription; in combination, the three drugs work synergistically, it is a lethal combination I learned about in the methadone clinic I has been going to. So, with that in mind, at 0:30 hours I chewed up a bottle of 30, 2mg klonopin, then at 0:45, the 25 bars of Xanax. I began drinking; like i said,i don't drink much at all,i did do the other drugs frequently, and i was stung on heroin, so the2 pints of 190 proof were my contingency, and at 1:15, began sticking the four needles i had pre-loaded with a half gram of heroin each into the muscle of my thigh.
That may have been what saved me, if all the heroin had entered my blood at once, it would have overwhelmed my system, and I never would have woken. I went out right after pulling the last rig out of my thigh. I remember the floor rising to meet me, as my eyes closed. I had no regret over my decision, this was final, the only thing I had control over, I thought, but as is usually the case, what I thought I could control, I had no say in.
The next thing i remember is another object rising to meet my face-an icy puddle. I heard cackling, and as i fell, i was able to discern that a group of homeless drunks were being entertained by my stumbling, and fall. My face slammed into a metal street sign, i remember it was cold, hard, and yellow. Next, i found myself on my side, in a puddle of icy black water, i was barefoot, and in a t-shirt and pajamas. It was February, and I was four miles from where i had planned to lay down my sorrows, forever.
"*in the shadow play, enter your own death, know no more*" Ian Curtis, who sang those words as leader of the post-punk band Joy Division, hung himself from a clothes rack. He often sang of beauty and loss, and the eternal desperation that separates the two. Like many men, and women before him and since, he could not see beyond a thick wall of impenetrable darkness upon which all attempts to penetrate beyond are denied, and before it a void into which all hope vanishes like heavy stone into black water, disappearing into the depths, an emptiness which nullifies all accomplishment, and wipes out imagination in it's relentless hunger for anything good. Emptied of all possibility, one is left staring at a concrete floor, ten stories below, or finds one possibility left, at the end of a rope. Like within the depths of the Pacific Northwest winter, when the clouds have blanketed the earth for months, only letting light filtered through then to reach the ground, it is dark, and the clouds that be comfort, like a soft blanket over a soft bed, become oppressive. Without light we fall into ourselves, and without light within, we can fall prey to deep depressions over nothing more than the weather. The thing is though, that although the grey extends to all horizons, and beyond, one need only go UP, ascend into the cloud bank just a short distance and one still break through into blue and clear skies, and one can see forever. Its just metaphor, but it applies well.
No, i cannot grasp what she is going through, but i get Davie. Getting out of the puddle as quickly as i could,I tried to understand what was going on. The combination of drugs made thinking impossible, I could not keep a train of thought on track for more than a few seconds.at the very most. It was if my entire world was composed if non-sequiters. I could not connect images, thoughts and concepts. I was so utterly fucking lost, in every imaginable sense of the word.
Somehow,I realized i was under the Morrison bridge, several miles and across the Willamette river from where I had begun. I had no idea how i ended up there,i never visit that neighborhood, all i can think is somehow my brain was functioning in a pure survival mode, realizing that if i didn't keep moving,i would stop breathing, and the place i ended up was downhill from my home, and i was following the path of least gravitational resistance.
The drunks were guffawing and cackling away, they were not in any concern for a half naked, stumbling, crying man. No-one was. I had tried to die because i felt so all alone, alone and dealing with more suffering than I had resources to bear. And I still was. I could not cope with the life I had pursued, and now, I had to make my way back home, in more ways than one.
I'm really not sure how i got back to my apartment,i remember a bus, missing my stop, people yelling at me, but i woke up on my bed the next day, dopesick and sobbing right out if slumber, and I cleaned myself up a best I could, so i could go commit the crimes necessary for me to get well. That was years ago, and only now would I consider to have even approached anything close to "well", then, well meant another shot of dope.
I tried again, two weeks later, same thing, but that time,i went out, and didn't walk. I woke up after that suicide attempt too and it made me see what it was, a plea for help,although it has taken almost a decade to begin to get that help. I saw what i was doing, attempting suicide, and that i did not want to die,i just didn't know how to live. I don't know about Davie, but just judging from the premeditated scene, it seems he had long passed the asking for help phase. But it doesn't seem like he asked,there was no ultimatum from her, other than the most rational demand that he be "clean"-without all its moral connotations intact-whatever definition they had for that, it was more than three months of white-knuckle 12 hour shifts, exhausting himself from the ability to use until he broke, which is what happened here, and far to often.
I get why he died, that's actually not the hard part to understand, what i cannot grasp, is why he chose to victimize Kaylie through his own death. I can even understand "making a statement", I stood on the tenth-story ledge I mentioned earlier, contemplating the only statement I felt I was able to make, by splattering my brains all over the pavement of a treatment facilIty that I had entered looking for help, and at the time felt had ruined my life. I didn't see my accountability on the issue, but that's another story entirely.
Kaylie, I don't know, is just so-innocent isn't the word, but more naive. Just on the sense that she's in about the shittiest element of society but doesn't seem to be aware of the danger she is in. Maybe I'm over-protective, maybe its just more co-dependence. Obviously, there is much to the circumstances surrounding Davies death I'll never know, I only know the girl I feel obligated to protect through thus. So I know I'm projecting my own emotions onto it, but maybe that is my way of gaining a further understanding of why i was in that place, so many times, it really is some kind of wonder that I survived.
Its been a long and hard road out of that place of eternal sorrow into where I am now, which is vantage point, above the chaos, where i can see, not so far off, into lands lit with light of promise. I still have a ways to go, and if I ever do stop moving it will be by death, but not by my own hand, suicide is an impossibility, at this point.
The thing that upsets me the most is the un-necessariness of his death. If i can be here, on this this gorgeous spring morning,so could have he, but we can't know why one man lives and another dies in similar circumstances.
It is what it is.
IN LVX
CGE
6.2013
Sine experientia nihil sufficienter sciri potest -Roger Bacon
*γνῶθι σεαυτόν*